Results

CEP Covid-19 analysis

City of dreams no more, a year on: worklessness and active labour market policies in urban India

This report provides key findings from a new field survey to assess the long-term impact of Covid-19 on urban workers in low-income areas of India. The survey took place during February and March 2021, just before the s...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Political Economy:

Planning ahead for better neighborhoods: Long-run evidence from tanzania

Africa’s demand for urban housing is soaring, even as it faces a proliferation of slums. In this setting, can modest infrastructure investments in greenfield areas where people subsequently build their own houses facilit...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Political Economy:

Planning Ahead for Better Neighborhoods: Long-Run Evidence from Tanzania

Africa’s demand for urban housing is soaring, even as it faces a proliferation of slums. In this setting, can modest infrastructure investments in greenfield areas where people subsequently build their own houses facilit...Read more...

Blog

Grantham Institute blogs:

The answer to housing's stubborn carbon emissions problem: green offsets

Paul Cheshire and Christian Hilber propose 'green offsets' to reduce property taxes in a way that is strictly scaled to energy efficiency, as a simple intervention to address the UK's urgent need to reduce its residentia...Read more...

External publication

Pancakes to Pyramids: City Form to Promote Sustainable Growth (English)

Towns and cities are economic and social microcosms in which large numbers of people and firms interact. These interactions largely shape how a city looks, how it functions, and how it grows. But how exactly does this ma...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Why housing is built in flood-prone coastal areas

Despite the higher susceptibility to floods and a growing climate crisis, more than 10% of the world's population live in low-elevation coastal zones, and that percentage is growing. Yatang Lin, Thomas McDermott and Guy ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Urban Economics:

The local economic impacts of regeneration projects: Evidence from UK's single regeneration budget

Many governments aim to improve the labour market outcomes of people living in deprived areas through "place-making" initiatives. Economists are often sceptical about the effectiveness of such policies, but empirical evi...Read more...

Journal article

Regional Science and Urban Economics: Forthcoming

Viewing urban spatial history from tall buildings

Micro-geographic data capturing the spatial distribution of economic activity within cities in history are difficult to access. This paper discusses how tall and durable buildings can be exploited as a source of "big dat...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... Economics of skyscrapers

Many tall buildings appear to be out of scale given contemporary perceptions. But according to Gabriel Ahlfeldt and Jason Barr, the vast majority have a solid economic case for their construction....Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... City of dreams no more: Covid-19 in urban India

The pandemic has decimated livelihoods in urban India and created a new underclass of workers who are being pushed into poverty. A CEP report by Shania Bhalotia, Swati Dhingra and Fjolla Kondirolli calls for a national w...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

The use of designer reputation to build tall in London

Height exemptions are made easier when a world-famous architect is involved, but the process carries hidden costs, writes Paul Cheshire....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The crisis and job guarantees in urban India

This paper uses a new field survey of low-wage areas of urban India to show that employment and earnings were decimated by the lockdown resulting from the Covid-19 crisis. It examines workers’ desire for a job guarantee ...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

Will coronavirus cause a big city exodus?

Big cities thrive because of the economic and social benefits of proximity - but proximity also helps to spread Covid-19. Does this mean an end to the big city revival of recent years? Much will depend on how quickly we ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Urban Economics:

Land tenure and land-use in a developing city: A quantitative spatial model applied to Kampala, Uganda

Land rights and tenure systems are an important factor behind poor housing and inefficient land-use in developing country cities. In Kampala, Uganda, four systems of land tenure coexist, allowing a detailed study of the ...Read more...

CEP Covid-19 analysis

City of dreams no more: the impact of Covid-19 on urban workers in India

Many developing economies have large informal sectors and growing urban youth populations, who lack basic social protections at work. The CEP surveyed 8,500 workers aged 18 to 40 in urban India to understand their experi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Globalisation and urban polarisation

External trade affects the internal spatial structure of an economy, promoting growth in some cities or regions and decline in others. Internal adjustment to these changes has often proved to be extremely slow and painfu...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The economics of skyscrapers: a synthesis

This paper provides a synthesis of the state of knowledge on the economics of skyscrapers. First, we document how vertical urban growth has gained pace over the course of the 20th century. Second, we lay out a simple the...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics:

Flooded cities

Does economic activity move away from areas that are at high risk of recurring shocks? We examine this question in the context of floods, which displaced more than 650 million people worldwide in the last 35 years. We st...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Urban Economics:

Measuring urban economic density

At the heart of urban economics are agglomeration economies, which drive the existence and extent of cities. This paper estimates urban agglomeration effects, exploring simple and very nuanced measures of economic densit...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Dirty density: air quality and the density of American cities

We study whether urban density affects the exposure of city dwellers to ambient air pollution using satellite-derived measures of air quality for the contiguous United States. For identification, we rely on an instrument...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The urban wage premium in imperfect labour markets

Using administrative data for West Germany, this paper investigates whether part of the urban wage premium stems from fierce competition in thick labour markets. We first establish that employers possess less wage-settin...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Housing Economics:

Institutional settings and urban sprawl: Evidence from Europe

This article explores the role of institutional settings in determining spatial variation in urban sprawl across Europe. We first synthesize the emerging literature that links land use policies and local fiscal incentive...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Housing Economics:

Housing in Europe: A different continent – A continent of differences

This article provides the introduction to the special issue on ‘Housing in Europe: a different continent – a continent of differences’ in the Journal of Housing Economics in 2018. Europe is a large continent with a long ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association:

Does additional spending help urban schools? An evaluation using boundary discontinuities

This study exploits spatial anomalies in school funding policy in England to provide new evidence on the impact of resources on student achievement in urban areas. Anomalies arise because the funding allocated to Local E...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Location, Search Costs and Youth Unemployment: Experimental Evidence from Transport Subsidies

Do high search costs affect the labour market outcomes of jobseekers living far away from jobs? I randomly assign transport subsidies to unemployed youth in urban Ethiopia. Treated respondents increase job search intensi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does gentrification displace poor households? An 'identification-via-interaction' approach

My theoretical model motivates an ‘identification-via-interaction’ (IvI) approach that separates the causal impact of gentrification on poor exits from endogenous channels. In the empirical analysis, I create a measure o...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Colonial Legacies: Shaping African Cities

Differential institutions imposed during colonial rule continue to affect the spatial structure and urban interactions in African cities. Based on a sample of 318 cities across 28 countries using satellite data on built ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Regional Science:

A review of volume 5 of the Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics

[No abstract available]...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Review of Economic Policy:

Life in a slum: Understanding living conditions in Nairobi's slums across time and space

This paper overviews the role of slums in urban Africa, focusing on Nairobi. It reveals the characteristics of slums and how these have changed over time. Spatially disaggregated data show that slum areas are very dense ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Planning Ahead for Better Neighborhoods: Long Run Evidence from Tanzania

What are the long run consequences of planning and providing basic infrastructure in neighborhoods, where people build their own homes? We study "Sites and Services" projects implemented in seven Tanzanian cities during ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Local Economic Impacts of Regeneration Projects: Evidence from UK's Single Regeneration Budget

We study the local economic impacts of a major regeneration programme aimed at enhancing the quality of life of local people in deprived neighbourhoods in the UK. The analysis is based on a panel of firm and area level d...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Compact City in Empirical Research: A Quantitative Literature Review

The ‘compact city’ is one of the most prominent concepts to have emerged in the global urban policy debate, though it is difficult to ascertain to what extent its theorised positive outcomes can be substantiated by evide...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Urban Economics:

Urban economics for the developing World: An introduction

This is an introduction to the special issue of the Journal of Urban Economics on “Urbanization in Developing Countries: Past and Present”. We argue that the rapid urbanization and the rise of cities in the developing wo...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Urban Economics:

Political favoritism in China's capital markets and its effect on city sizes

This paper examines political favoritism of cites in national capital markets and the effect of that favoritism on city sizes. The paper estimates the city-by-city variation in the prices of capital across cities in Chin...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Economic Effects of Density: A Synthesis

This paper synthesises the state of knowledge on the economic effects of density. We consider 15 outcome categories and 202 estimates of density elasticities from 102 studies. More than 50% of these estimates have not be...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Urban Economics:

Spatial frictions

The world is replete with spatial frictions. Shipping goods across cities entails trade frictions. Commuting within cities causes urban frictions. How important are these frictions in shaping the spatial economy? We deve...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Geography:

Agglomeration externalities and urban growth controls

How can land use policy enhance the exploitation of external urban agglomeration economies? In a system of heterogeneous cities, we show that the second-best land use policy constrains city creation, while subsidizing (t...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Geography:

Urban renewal after the Berlin wall: A place-based policy evaluation

We use a quasi-experimental research design to study the effects of a spatially targeted renewal policy implemented in Berlin, Germany, in the aftermath of the city's division during the Cold War period. Our results sugg...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Location, Search Costs and Youth Unemployment: Experimental Evidence from Transport Subsidies in Addis Ababa

Do high search costs affect the labour market outcomes of job seekers living far away from jobs? I randomly assign transport subsidies to unemployed youth in urban Ethiopia. Treated respondents increase job search intens...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Building the City: Urban Transition and Institutional Frictions

We model the building of a city, estimate parameters of the model, and calculate welfare losses from institutional frictions encountered in changing land-use. We distinguish formal and slum construction technologies; in ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Subways and Urban Growth: Evidence from Earth

We investigate the relationship between the extent of a city’s subway network, its population and its spatial configuration. To accomplish this investigation, for the 632 largest cities in the world, we construct panel d...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Flooded Cities

Economic activity tends to return to flood-prone areas after floods rather than relocating to higher ground. What’s more, cities built in flood-prone areas are locking in exposure to flood risk for the long term. These a...Read more...

Journal article

Ecological Economics:

The greener, the happier? The effect of urban land use on residential well-being

We investigate the effect of urban land use on residential well-being in major German cities, using panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and cross-section data from the European Urban Atlas. We reduce concerns...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Flooded cities

Does economic activity relocate away from areas that are at high risk of recurring shocks? We examine this question in the context of floods, which are among the costliest and most common natural disasters. Over the past...Read more...

CEP election analysis

The Economic Performance of UK Cities: Can Urban and Regional Policy Make a Difference to the North-South Divide

There are large variations in economic performance across UK cities and on some measures, they have widened since the global financial crisis. All main parties promise action to reduce them, but there is little differenc...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Urban Development and Air Pollution: Evidence from a Global Panel of Cities

We exploit a unique panel of 75 metro areas (‘cities’) across the globe and employ a city-fixed effects model to identify the determinants of within-city changes in air pollution concentration between 2005 and 2011. Incr...Read more...

Book

Urban Economics and Urban Policy
Challenging Conventional Policy Wisdom Hardcover

In this bold, exciting and readable volume, Paul Cheshire, Max Nathan and Henry Overman illustrate the insights that recent economic research brings to our understanding of cities, and the lessons for urban policy-making...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Culturally Clustered or in the Cloud? Location of Internet Start-ups in Berlin

Knowledge based firms like IT companies do neither have a capital- nor a land intensive production. They predominantly rely on qualified labour and increasingly depend on the location of its (potential) employees. This i...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Urban Renewal after the Berlin Wall

Urban renewal areas are popular but empirically understudied spatial planning instruments designed to prevent urban decline and induce renewal. We use a quasi-experimental research design to study the effects of 22 renew...Read more...

CentrePiece article

The economic future of British cities

Henry Overman surveys the evidence on potentially effective responses to the recession and longer-term structural change....Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Urban Wage Growth Premium: Sorting or Learning?

This paper is concerned with the urban wage premium and addresses two central issues about which the field has not yet reached a consensus. First, the extent to which sorting of high ability individuals into urban areas ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Specialization and Regional Economic Development

Debates about urban growth and change often center on specialization.However, arguments linking specialization to metropolitan economic development contain diverse, and sometimes conflicting, claims. Is it better to be h...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Ambition, Human Capital Acquisition and the Metropolitan Escalator

This paper examines the relation between ambition, as a form of dynamic human capital, and the escalator role of high order metropolitan regions, as originally identified by Fielding (1989). It argues that occupational p...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

A Note on the Value of Foregone Open Space in Sprawling Cities

Foregone benefits of the open space that is sacrificed through urban sprawl are hard to quantify. We obtain a simple benchmark measure by introducing a demand for trips beyond the urban boundary into the monocentric city...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

External Benefits of Brownfield Redevelopment: An Applied Urban General Equilbirum Analysis

Does brownfield redevelopment warrant government support? We explore several external benefits in an urban general equilibrium framework. Preferences are modelled such that demand for housing units in the city is downwar...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Spatial Frictions

The world is replete with spatial frictions. Shipping goods across cities entails trade frictions. Commuting within cities causes urban frictions. How important are these frictions in shaping the spatial economy? We deve...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

Does Additional Spending Help Urban Schools? An Evaluation Using Boundary Discontinuities

Improvement of educational attainment in schools in urban, disadvantaged areas is an important priority for policy – particularly in countries like England which have a long tail at the bottom of the educational distribu...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Does Additional Spending Help Urban Schools? An Evaluation Using Boundary Discontinuities

Improvement of educational attainment in schools in urban, disadvantaged areas is an important priority for policy – particularly in countries like England which have a long tail at the bottom of the educational distribu...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Effects of Agglomeration on Wages: Evidence from the Micro-Level

This paper estimates individual wage equations in order to test two rival non-nested theories of economic agglomeration, namely New Economic Geography (NEG), as represented by the NEG wage equation and urban economic (UE...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Economics of Super-Diversity: Findings from British Cities, 2001-2006

British cities have a surprisingly long history of cultural diversity. Recently they have become significantly more multicultural, with ‘super-diversity’ emerging in many urban neighbourhoods. Public interest in these ch...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Long Term Impacts of Migration in British Cities: Diversity, Wages, Employment and Prices

British cities are becoming more culturally diverse, with migration a main driver. Is this growing diversity good for urban economies? This paper explores, using a new 16-year panel of UK cities. Over time, net migration...Read more...

CEP election analysis

CEP Election Analysis 2010 - The complete Series, discussing research on some of the key policy battlegrounds of the 2010 General Election

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CEP election analysis

Urban Renewal and Regional Growth: Muddled Objectives and Mixed Progress

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SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Agglomeration Elasticities and Firm Heterogeneity

This paper estimates the relationship between agglomeration and multi factor productivity at the one digit industry level and by region using longitudinal firm level data for New Zealand. A key focus of the paper is on m...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Fluctuating Record of Economic Regeneration in England's Second-Order City Regions, 1984-2007

This study examines how far and in what way ‘Our cities are back’, as claimed by England’s Core Cities Group. It focuses on 1984-2007 employment changes for the eight Core Cities and their city regions: Birmingham, Brist...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Survival of the Fittest in Cities: Agglomeration, Selection and Polarisation

Empirical studies consistently report that labour productivity and TFP rise with city size. The reason is that cities attract the most productive agents, select the best of them, and make the selected ones even more prod...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Survival of the Fittest in Cities: Agglomeration, Selection, and Polarisation

Empirical studies consistently report that labour productivity and TFP rise with city size. The reason is that cities attract the most productive agents, select the best of them, and make the selected ones even more prod...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Urbanisation and Structural Transformation

This paper presents new evidence on urbanization using sub-county data for the United States from 1880-2000 and municipality data for Brazil from 1970-2000. We show that the two central stylized features of population gr...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Effect of Information and Communication Technologies on Urban Structure

The geographic concentration of economic activity occurs because transport costs for goods, people and ideas give individuals and organisations incentives to locate close to each other. Historically, all of these costs h...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Economic Linkages Across Space

We develop a diagrammatic framework that can be used to study the economic linkages between regions or cities. Hitherto, such linkages have not been the primary focus of either the theoretical or empirical literatures. W...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

Urban Density and Pupil Attainment

We explore the association between urban density and pupil attainment using three cohorts of pupils in schooling in England. Although – as widely recognised – attainment in dense urban places is low on average, this is n...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Fat City: The Relationship Between Urban Sprawl and Obesity

We study the relationship between urban sprawl and obesity. Using data that tracks individuals over time, we find no evidence that urban sprawl causes obesity. We show that previous findings of a positive relationship mo...Read more...

Journal article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

Causes of sprawl: a portrait from space

We study the extent to which US urban development is sprawling and what determines differences in sprawl across space. Using remote-sensing data to track the evolution of land use on a grid of 8.7 billion 30 x 30 metre c...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Agglomeration and the Adjustment of the Spatial Economy

We consider the literatures on urban systems and New Economic Geography to examine questions concerning agglomeration and how areas respond to shocks to the economic environment. We first propose a diagrammatic framework...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Evaluating Urban Transport Improvements: Cost Benefit Analysis in the Presence of Agglomeration and Income Taxation

There is a substantial empirical literature quantifying the positive relationship between city size and productivity. The paper draws out the implications of this productivity relationship for evaluations of urban transp...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Cities, Matching and the Productivity Gains of Agglomeration

The striking geographical concentration of economic activities suggests that there are substantial benefits to agglomeration. However, the nature of those benefits remains unclear. In this paper we take advantage of a ne...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Buzz: Face-to-Face Contact and the Urban Economy

This paper argues that existing models of urban concentrations are incomplete unless grounded in the most fundamental aspect of proximity; face-to-face contact. Face-to-face contact has four main features; it is an effic...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Zipfs Law for Cities: An Empirical Examination

We use data for metro areas in the United States, from the US Census for 1900 û 1990, to test the validity of Zipf's Law for cities. Previous investigations are restricted to regressions of log size against log rank. In...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Spatial Evolution of the US Urban System

We test implications of economic geography models for location, size and growth of cities with US Census data for 1900 û 1990. Our tests involve non-parametric estimations of stochastic kernels for the distributions of c...Read more...